


Left Behind

by Truth



Category: Doom (2005)
Genre: Death, Monsters, Other, Trauma, Violence, possible incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-02-01
Updated: 2007-02-01
Packaged: 2017-10-12 21:51:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/129444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Truth/pseuds/Truth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Unanswered questions are the most dangerous kind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Left Behind

**Author's Note:**

> I originally began this for a New Year's Resolution story for [](http://community.livejournal.com/yuletide/profile)[**yuletide**](http://community.livejournal.com/yuletide/) for 2005. I obviously haven't finished it yet, but if I don't post it somewhere, I'll never get around to it.
> 
> Unfortunately, the prompt vanished before I made a note of who requested it.

  
  


_  
**The smell of rotting flesh, of over-heated metal and burning plastic and electronics still hung in the air despite the best efforts of the air exchange. The occasional 'pop' of a shorting circuit could be heard as well as the scurrying of one of the lucky escapees from the ruined genetics lab; seeking safety among the miles of ductwork that had supported the inhabitants of the Olduvai facility from the hostile reality of conditions on Mars' surface.**   
_

_  
**Despite the still-cycling air and the steady, slow drip of water from somewhere between the destroyed labs and the atrium, it was a dead place; in more ways than one. Tragedy on tragedy had struck Olduvai and as the warning lights flickered in the abandoned tunnels and along the catwalks, tragedy waited to strike again.**   
_

**  
_Three and a half bodies decorated the med lab in various stages of rot and decay._   
**

**  
_An ugly splotch of blood painted the floor and wall beside the half-corpse of the creature who had once answered to 'Dr. Carmack'. A trail of torn and discarded fatigues and equipment led away from the dark smears of blood and away into the darkened tunnels._   
**

Dr. Samantha Grimm was, ironically, not fond of hospitals. She hadn't voluntarily seen the inside of one since the medical examinations required before she would be allowed through the Ark. The time before that had been with some of her parent's colleagues, waiting to see if they'd release her brother from the hospital.

John had taken several layers of skin off his hands and broken two fingers trying to dig through the rubble that had buried their parents. They'd waited there for seven hours before the medical staff had come out to tell them that John was still in shock….

She'd been in shock as well, but as she hadn't been the one screaming, hadn't broken her arm trying to get away from the doctors, no one had noticed. It had been as if, with the death of her parents, she'd lost her brother, too.

For years, whenever she thought about John it was the memory of the hospital that came to her, the smell of antiseptic and sickness, the sound of her brother's sobbing and the sudden onset of cold, hard reality. She was an orphan and she'd never be able to go home.

Waking to that same smell, dazed and nauseous, all that she could think was that it had simply been a terrible, terrible dream – some sick sort of wish fulfillment that had taken her to a place where she'd do _anything_ to get her twin back after ten long years.

It took her several minutes, fighting back tears, to realize that the dazed feeling wasn't shock, but the effect of some sort of medication. Pushing herself up onto one elbow brought a further surge of nausea and the realization that she'd managed to do something fairly horrible to her hip and also to one arm.

 _Running…._

She'd been running, out of breath and terrified, sobbing... and she'd fallen – tripped over the torn body of one of the girls she'd used to share her lunch with. Teresa lay sprawled at the top of a flight of stairs - her legs at the bottom.

Horror and shock had kept Samantha from catching herself and she'd gone down – hard. Despite the pain of falling down the metal stairs, there was too much adrenaline still pumping to keep her down and Samantha had staggered to her feet, limping away as fast as she could. The second time she'd fallen, going head over heels as she slipped in a slick pool of blood, she'd hit her head.

Everything was grey and dim after that, like a bad dream. Shock again, probably.

"John…."

She'd left him when he'd ceased breathing, running _away_ because she couldn't stay, couldn't face the fact that she'd lost her brother _again_. She'd known in her heart that he wouldn't wake a monster. He was her twin and, despite the appellation 'Reaper' given to him by the RRTS, she knew him best of anyone in the world.

… but she didn't know if he'd wake human or even if he'd remember her. Super fast, super strong, greater than human intellect and healing factor… maybe she'd saved his life only to lose him again.

For the slightest chance to keep her brother, Samantha would fight death itself.

 _'Sam….'_

He'd been there, she was so sure of it, been there to help her escape. It was all so vague and far away, like a bad dream that won't actually fade no matter how hard you try to forget. John was gone, even if he had survived, and nothing had changed at all.

She closed her eyes, attempting to ignore the soft beep of the heart monitor and let herself fall back into sleep.

 _**The flashing lights in the empty tunnels went out, one by one. The fading bleat of the emergency claxons fell to silence with a deliberate crunch of metal and glass. Only the emergency lighting remained, insufficient for anything save finding your way to the nearest, helpfully illuminated exit, wavering and too harsh for comfort despite the lack of useful light.** _

**_**Darkness now made harder to penetrate by the contrast of the unhelpfully flickering lights, the only sounds the faint and failing wheeze of the atmospheric systems, the drip of water and the faint crackle and pop from ruined electronics.** _ **

_**Olduvai was a dead place now, dead as it had been for millennia, save for the soft scrape and step of movement and the hoarse rasp of air.** _

_"It's been _two weeks_." Frustration had Samantha in its grasp and she wanted to scream. "I'm certainly healthy enough to leave the hospital and if you try to keep me here for much longer, I'm going to…."_

"Please, Dr. Grimm. You have to understand that we're only interested in what's best for you as a patient."

This was the first time that Samantha had so much as laid eyes on the doctor supposedly in charge of her case, and the fact that she'd last seen the name 'Alfred Lewis' in the header of an academic paper on neurochemistry was less than reassuring. "I'm perfectly healthy, except for the limp. There is no reason in the world to keep me here and even less to keep me…."

"Dr. Grimm!" Lewis rubbed at his forehead, giving her an exasperated look. "We're under military protocol until a full exploration of the events at Olduvai has been completed. They lost almost a full RRTS team there and…."

"Almost!" Samantha's eyes lit as she nearly pounced on the man, gait uneven as she pushed away from her bed. "So. John _is_ alive!"

The doctor took a step away, looking uneasy. "Yes, well, I'm not allowed to talk about that."

"Not allowed?" Samantha's eyes narrowed as she took another limping step toward the shorter neurologist, expression threatening. "Look here, you…."

"Not allowed!" he nearly squawked, backing away rapidly. "Military protocol! They've got guards on this entire wing and nobody's allowed to talk about _anything_."

With an angry snort, Samantha limped back to her bed. "I want answers, Dr. Lewis, and I'm not going to wait for much longer. You get someone down here to talk to me or, so help me, I'll find a way to make sure that the entire story is spread across every news broadcast on the planet."

With a last, uncertain look at his volatile patient, Dr. Lewis fled.

Samantha gingerly leaned back against the bed, staring up at the ceiling with a grim smile. John was still _alive_ , and that made the waiting easier.

 **_The thing that roamed the abandoned halls did so silently, sticking to the shadows and sewers. When it finally made its way to the room that had once held the Ark, it made its first sound. The explosion which had destroyed the instant conduit from Mars to the Earth had taken half the room with it, leaving an almost molten crater with odd, frozen drippings of re-solidified metal hanging from the ceiling like the teeth in a disfigured maw._ **

_**_It stood in the center of the room and howled, a bone-chilling sound that echoed through the abandoned passages – heard only by the rotting dead._ ** _

**The sound went on for what seemed like hours before slowly tapering off, leaving the thing with its fists clenched at its sides, blood running from the deep, ugly punctures made by its own claws.**

 **By the time it moved away again into the shadows, a sullen slouch to its shoulders, the rents had already healed. It let itself be swallowed by the darkness… and there was again nothing but silence.**

When morning came, Samantha woke to weight settling on the edge of her bed. Blearily, she rubbed at her eyes, blinking free of sleep to see a familiar face looking solemnly back.

"John!"

"Hey, Sam." He reached out to tug gently on a lock of her hair. "How're you feeling?"

Full circle, another hospital room, another tragedy in the past… but this time he was the one reaching out, and she wasn't going to allow a repetition of the last time. She shoved herself upright to wrap her arms around him, holding on fiercely. " _Much_ better."

"Well enough to go home?" He held her close, smiling a little as she pulled back a little, startled.

"'Home'? John, they're not going to let anyone go back through the Ark without decontamination and…."

He let her go, shaking his head and losing the smile. "The Ark is gone, Sam, at least on the Mars end."

"Gone?" Samantha was beginning to feel like an echo and it irritated her. "What do you mean, 'gone'?"

"I mean that it was destroyed." John sighed and rubbed at the bridge of his nose. "Right now, there's no way to get _to_ Mars, and no telling what might be going on there."

"There's _nothing_ going on there," she told him flatly. "They're all _dead_ John. All of them." Eighty-four dead, and that was just the survivors of the initial outbreak - that didn't count the RRTS squad, the original six missing scientists or their test subject. The real irony was that so many of them had died here on Earth.

He grimaced, shrugging. "The UAC isn't so certain of that. Everything's been kept pretty quiet, thanks to the involvement of the RRTS, but even without the Ark it's possible to tell that the installation up there is still drawing on power. There's light and air and all the systems that didn't go down with the Ark are still running. They're not ready to write off the possibility that something survived."

Samantha shuddered, unable to suppress the reaction as her mind conjured up images of Goat, a monster swelling up beneath his skin as he fought against it - of Dr. Carmack, driven mad and then out the other side as the very thing he'd fought to develop devoured him alive. She turned, burying her face against her brother's chest as she shook, tears finally falling for her friends and her colleagues – all dead.

"Shhhhh. It's all right, Sam." John held her as she cried angry tears, mourning for all of those who had died so horribly because of a single, stupid mistake. It wasn't the sorrow you had to watch out for, but the anger… and he wanted her to get it out of her system before he told her the rest of it. She deserved the time to mourn.

Two nurses came and went, convinced to leave simply by the look on John's face as he glanced up from his sister at each interruption. Samantha had rarely cried when they were children, always hideously embarrassed by tears. John wanted her to have her privacy until she pulled herself together again. He'd spent the last two weeks remembering the smell of the raw sewage in the tunnels and listening to Portman's agonized screams – remembering the look on Sarge's face when he'd shot The Kid….

Sam had spent her two weeks worrying about him, letting her fear keep the rest of it at bay. Now that he was here, it had all come crashing down on her. John simply waited for her to work her way through it, gently stroking her hair as she cried. Eventually, the tears slowed as Samantha managed to separate herself from the memories of everything that happened on Mars and at the Ark installation. She leaned against John still, however, wiping at her eyes as she tried to think of what, logically, would come next.

"They'll send another mission," she decided finally, her voice scratchy. "Further data retrieval and another squad of RRTs."

"Two, actually." John sighed. "Pinky brought back the feeds from the personal cameras and, after the Ark facility was opened again, some bright boy found them and loaded them up. They'll be going in armed for bear… and I suspect their mission will be mostly to make sure that whatever it was they brought to life up there is dead and _stays_ that way. They're not allowing anyone up there with the teams save a few technicians to see if they can't salvage the Ark or re-construct it."

"… and the data?" She looked up at him, fingers tightening in the fabric of his shirt. "What happened to the data?"

He gave her a half-smile. "It seems that Sarge took all four of the transfers for safe-keeping and when the Ark blew, it disintegrated with him."

"Is that true?" There was an angry intensity to her words as she stared at him, eyes wide. "Is it really gone for good?" His silence was enough of an answer, and her hands tightened into fists, pulling at the thin fabric of his shirt. "What did you do with it, John?"

"I hid it." He reached up to gently pull her hands loose from his shirt. "I don't know what this stuff is doing to me, Sam, or what it might still do. I couldn't risk destroying it. Not yet."

Samantha heaved a sigh of relief, leaning against him again as she began to relax. "I just… I can't imagine what might happen if that information were to get out. Look what we did with it the last time… and that was a team of people I _knew_ , that I _trusted_."

"It's all right," he told her, laughing quietly, although there wasn't much humor to the sound. He'd been with Sarge for most of his ten years with RRTS, and he couldn't bring himself to believe what had happened. "There was enough missing surveillance footage that they believed me when I told them Sarge took them… and enough still intact to show them what happened after he lost his mind to support it."

She sighed again, leaning on him and listening to the sound of his heartbeat. "What do we do next, John?"

"They want _you_ to go back to Mars." John told her dryly.

"What?!" Samantha stared up at him and he could guess what was running through her mind. "You can't be serious?"

He simply watched her, waiting.

"I can't go back there. I can't… I can't walk through that place. They turned my home into a charnel house, my work into a disaster… how can they _think_ that I would be willing to go back to, to _that_?!"

"They think that you're a scientist," John told her gently. "More importantly, they think that you're a scientist who cashes paychecks that they sign. Carmack was willing to move onto human test subjects, why wouldn't you be willing to pick up where he left off?"

"That's cold," she accused him tightly, pushing away and rising to her feet. She staggered a little, leg still not entirely willing to bear her weight. "My work was analysis, finding things to _help_ mankind, not alter it beyond all recognition."

"I think the UAC is having a bit of trouble telling the difference." John told her, shrugging. "They did fund Carmack's research, after all. They _knew_ what was going on up there." He turned to watch her pace, wincing a little as he took in her limp. "The current delay is because the RRTS is pitching a fit over being sent in without being given all the information first."

"What about you?" The thought brought her to a halt, turning to stare at him, eyes widening. "You're not going back, are you? That's a three week trip one-way – and I do mean 'one-way'."

John winced. "They asked me to…."

"And you told them no." She held up one hand. "If you gave any other answer, I don't want to hear it."

It should have started another fight, echoes of the disagreement that had torn them apart when he'd joined the RRTS ringing in both of their ears. John wasn't willing to walk that route again and he knew that Sam hadn't meant it that way. He sighed, falling back onto the bed and staring up at the ceiling. "The RRTS has declared that Olduvai currently falls under military jurisdiction. They're sending up two units to be sure that the threat has been neutralized and to see if a new Ark terminal is possible. The connection is still there, it's just the access hardware that was slagged. _After_ that, they want us _both_ to go back – help them figure out exactly what happened."

"The UAC _know_ what happened," Samantha retorted, limping back toward the bed so she could watch his face. "They funded human experimentation of Chromosome 24 and re-created the monster that destroyed an entire civilization."

"Thanks to us, the RRTS knows it too," John pointed out gently. "If anything happens to this team, Mars is going to be placed in permanent quarantine."

"The UAC has their own ships," Samantha sank onto the bed herself, rubbing her hip and sighing. "There isn't really any practical way to keep them away from the research, is there?"

"There is." John waited for her to reach the right conclusion, knowing that it was her lingering fear and anger that was keeping her from arriving at the correct answer immediately.

They stared at each other as she worked her way through it. When she eventually spoke, her hands were clenched at her sides. "… to go back to Olduvai and be certain that all the research data is destroyed. Personally."

"Can you do it, Sam?" The question was gentle.

Her eyes narrowed. "Even if I can't, you will… and I won't let you leave me behind again."

John smiled up at her. "You always were pushy."

"I'm older."

"By two minutes!" He pushed himself up onto one elbow, reaching out to again tug gently at a lock of her hair. "We have at least three weeks to decide what to do. Take a deep breath… and start planning."

 _**They entered the base through the abandoned archaeological site that had claimed the lives of a pair of doctors named Grimm. There were nineteen intruders, strong, well-armed men with an almost palpable edge of violence and purpose, all heavily laden with ordinance. In the true spirit of the RRTS, they forced the outer doors and airlock, sealing them once inside and shedding their atmospheric gear before setting out to take the place apart.** _

**_Twelve hours later, the small team of techs and their equipment were ferried inside the dead base – ready to reconstruct the severed umbilical to mother Earth._ **

**_"No sir." A crackling relay back to the transport ship, relayed in turn to that same blue/green planet, was appropriately calm. "No life signs of any sort. We're counting and identifying the dead now, or what's left of them – that's right. No disturbances."_ **

Three days passed before Samantha left the hospital. Two of those days were spent in an intense legal battle with the UAC to get her contract of employment terminated. Thankfully the RRTS provided a lawyer on her behalf, claiming that as military law had been invoked on Olduvai, any confidentiality agreements were null and void.

The UAC had been forced to swallow it, although the gently veiled threats directed at Samantha Grimm had been seasoned lightly with poisoned promises. They wanted her and what she knew and were obviously prepared to bribe, blackmail or worse to get what they wanted.

She'd never be fool enough to give it to them, no matter how badly she burned to explore chromosome 24 further. This had been her _life_ … and if she continued to pursue this, it would all come apart and she'd lose John again.

This was not a trade she was willing to make.

'Home' was now a small apartment that John had found, rented with the first of his retirement pay. He'd taken early retirement, a 'medical' discharge that came with a medal. Normal, the RRTS would've fought to keep him, but the stories he'd told had convinced the psychs that he'd never be of use as a battlefield soldier again.

"A paid _consultant_?" Samantha had dropped her bags when she'd heard that, and he'd been forced to retrieve them for her, urging her up the last few steps to their new apartment. "How did you manage _that_?"

"Deceit, intrigue, treachery." He smiled suddenly. "The usual."

She'd waited until they were inside before turning on him, one hand going to his face. He didn't move to stop her, waited patiently as she stared at him, almost nose to nose.

"You are still my brother in there, aren't you, John?" She hadn't had the courage to ask until now, belatedly afraid after their first meeting that every word they said had been monitored and haunted by the thought of their coming to take her brother away… of further 'human trials' of the chromosome she'd discovered and Dr. Carmack had used with such disastrous results.

"Ah, Sam." His hand came up to cover hers and the smile slipped a little. "I'll always be there for you, Sam. Things are a little… weird, but it doesn't really _feel_ very different. I had to do a lot of messing around to get the various medical and fitness tests to come out right."

"…I'm afraid."

Not of him, though, and he knew it. John drew her close and just held her for a long moment. "This is home… and we're together."

Days passed, turning to weeks as Samantha spent her days working through everything the RRTS had managed to force the Union Aerospace Corporation to hand over. She made notes, pointed out discrepancies and tried to fill in the gaps as best she could. She was ignoring the passage of time, ignoring the way that John tried so very hard to keep her focused on the here and now….

 _**They concentrated on the Ark at first, setting up camp in the destroyed room and keeping a solid perimeter. One team of soldiers remained with the techs as the other concentrated on gathering up the bodies and searching the complex.  
** _

**_They found nothing, despite careful searching. The water in the tunnels was carefully dredged, the labs surveyed and many, many pictures taken. Other than the bodies and the atmospheric systems, however, no one touched or handled anything much outside the Ark control room._ **

**_No one wanted to re-awaken whatever had been sleeping here._   
**

When the call finally came, Sam was ready for it – or so she thought. She would not allow John to leave her behind, even if it meant going back to Olduvai. When John came in, she was already packed, duffle resting beside the door as she went down the checklist of supplies she'd asked the RRTS to have ready for her at the Ark.

"Sam, are you sure that you want to do this?" It was the first time he'd asked her since their meeting at the hospital and Sam didn't even look up from her packing. "Sam?"

"I have to _know_ that it's been destroyed, John," she told him, stuffing a pair of heavy boots into her duffle bag. "I have to know that they're not going to try again and that there won't be anymore ravening _monsters_ …."

She knew the expression that he'd have on his face even before she raised her head, stricken at letting it finally slip out. They stared at each other for a long moment and she imagined, for a split second, that she could see someone else behind his eyes, watching and evaluating her with cold dispassion – and knowing that, in turn, he could see it in her face.

"John, I'm sorry." Sad, useless words, no matter how heartfelt.

He surprised her, producing a small, genuine smile. "You don't think I'm a monster, Sam. This was your idea, remember? In fact, I seem to recall your arguing with me at some length about how I _wasn't_ a monster."

Her answering smile was weak as she abandoned her packing, straightening to look him in the eye. "I don't think you're a monster."

But she could still see that _other_ behind his eyes. John wasn't a monster, no… but perhaps he wasn't her brother anymore, either.

 **Entry tags:**  
  
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